


Spend the winters by my side

by anamia



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: F/F, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-22 14:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17664017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamia/pseuds/anamia
Summary: ‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s get on with it and sell the rest.’The poor girl signed her soul away.Fantine and Eurydice find their way back out of Hadestown.





	Spend the winters by my side

Fantine arrived in Hadestown wild and cynical, already broken down enough by life up Top that she accepted the worst Hadestown had to offer with a bitter laugh that emphasized her missing teeth, as if to say, ‘this is no worse than what I had to endure up there.’ What that might have been, no one knew. Hadestown was not a place with time for solidarity, not this place where everyone already carried the burden of their own regrets. Fantine was shown the work, taught to swing a pickaxe in the mine and to shovel coal into the furnace, and left alone.

Eurydice took no more notice of her than she did any other new arrival: a flash of pity for the mistake they had made, a surge of jealousy at the smell of sunshine lingering in their hair, and nothing more. She  had her own work to do, her own sorrow to nurse, had Hades to hate and Persephone to desire. And Fantine was easy to ignore. She kept to herself from the start, turned away from newcomers and old hands alike, worked like she had something to forget.

Time passed. Persephone left for the summer and Hadestown got just a little colder without her, the factory floor just a little sharper as its workers missed their lady and her moonshine. Eurydice moved from the furnace to the wall, stacking bricks to the sky that she would never see again, working in unison with all the other lost souls who’d once thought Hadestown the answer to their problems. Fantine worked the mines, her pickaxe not quite in time with the others yet, her shorn hair blackened with coal-dust. The two women passed each other on occasion, during their breaks, as Eurydice joined the crowd eager to sneak some of Persephone’s leftover wine. Fantine watched them from a distance, ignored and indifferent to it. No one offered her a sip, even when one of the eager workers managed to grab the bottle without someone else slapping it from their hands. Nothing was free in Hadestown, not even the stolen fruit of the vine that stained their lips purple and left them craving it more than they had when they began. If Fantine wanted some, she would have to fight for it just like the others.

Fall returned, and with it Persephone, trailing the wind behind her, a sunbeam still caught in her smile. She laughed as the workers surged towards her, her hair letting off waves of rainfall and autumn leaves as she tossed her head back. Eurydice pressed forward with the rest, fighting for a spot near the front of the crowd, where the sunbeam in Persephone’s smile might cast just a hint of light on her ashen face.

“Single file now, you know the drill,” Persephone called out, still laughing. She had yet to remove her traveling cloak or unpack her barrels of contraband, but the proximity to the Top was too strong to resist. While Hades watched new hires sign away their souls in his mahogany and leather office, Persephone took a coin from each of his workers and gave them a taste of the summer.

* * *

“Who is she?”

Eurydice jumped, startled. It had been days, weeks since anyone had spoken to her during work hours, not since the last time the foreman sent her to a new workstation. She was making bricks again, mixing the mud until her palms were raw from sand and every part of her was covered in a red dust that would not come loose until she was moved to the mines, to replace it with coal.

“Who?” Her voice came out rough, more a croak than a word. She cleared her throat, coughed out some of the clay in her lungs, and tried again. “Who is who?”

“Her. The lady.”

Finally, Eurydice turned to look at the speaker. It was Fantine, standing a little ways away, her hands gripping her pickaxe so tightly her bones seemed to show through. Her face was streaked with dust, but her eyes shone brightly with a light Eurydice had never seen in her before.

“That’s Persephone. She’s the boss’ wife, not that he deserves her.”

“And she goes Up? To the outside world?”

“Yeah, every year.” Eurydice turned back to her work, waiting for a follow up question, but it never came. When she finally looked around, all she saw was Fantine’s back as the other woman went back to her work.

* * *

The next time Persephone offered her bottle around, Fantine was in the crowd with the others.

* * *

Eurydice heard about the bargain through the whispers of the workers. Tongues flowed more freely in the winter, loosened by Persephone’s wine and warmed by her presence. Gossip traveled to those who cared to hear it, passed around under the hammering of the mines and the screaming of the furnace. “The new girl,” the gossip said, “she sends her wages up Top. Made a deal with the boss. Doesn’t even keep enough for herself to buy a spot by the fire.”

Even among the jaded workers of Hadestown, this news was enough to spark interest. Interest, and envy. The slenderest of ties to the Top set someone apart, in this place where one more taste of the sky was the only thing anyone longed for. Orpheus’ failed rescue had made a pariah of Eurydice for years; even now there were some, old hands without a trace of color left in their bodies, who avoided her eye and spat on her shadow. To have haggled with the boss, to have won a concession from him, these were things of note. Once ignored, Fantine how had eyes tracking her every move. She seemed not to notice.

Eurydice watched her on occasion, but she had nothing but a brief moment of pity to spare. Fantine would find it hard going here, she who still had not quite mastered the rhythm of the work, who now had whispers following her and women with cold eyes asking cruel questions about the man she’d left behind. “There is no man,” Fantine said, and refused to answer any more questions. She set her back to her work and tried to keep up and acted like she didn’t hear the snickers of the workers around her when she missed a swing.

* * *

Spring came again, and with it the cold ache that was Persephone’s absence. Eurydice hunched her shoulders against the sudden void, kept her head down and spoke to no one. The gossip dried up, as tongues became too thirsty to talk and as the boss drove them harder than ever to make up for their idleness of winter. The whispers around Fantine fell away, replaced with cold silence that cut to the bone.

The foreman sent Eurydice to the mine, to take her turn in the stifling air of the tunnels, choking on coal dust and aching from walking hunched to fit through the narrow openings. Fantine had yet to be moved somewhere new, stuck there until she mastered the work, punished for her ineptitude and for her audacity. Eurydice stepped into the space beside her.

“You’re holding it wrong,” she whispered, watching Fantine work out of the corner of her eye. “Here, do it like this.”

Fantine started, missed her swing even more than she would have anyway, and didn’t react as the foreman swore at her for it. Eurydice demonstrated again, her own swings in perfect time with the others, the result of years of backbreaking practice with no one to teach her the way.

When Fantine swung again, she hit her mark. For the first time Eurydice could remember, she saw the ghost of a smile on Fantine’s lips.

* * *

"It’s not a man.”

They were working together again, Fantine having at last mastered the mine with Eurydice’s whispered help and been sent to learn the furnace instead. Eurydice hated the furnace, with its blazing heat that seemed to tear through you worse than the icy wind on the wall, its unending roar and ceaseless hunger. There was no rest on the furnace, lest the flames start to falter from lack of fuel. An endless rhythm of shoveling, scooping coal from the giant pile and throwing it to the furnace’s maw, receiving only burning sparks and plumes of acrid smoke in return.

“What?” Eurydice said, or tried to say. She got a lungful of smoke instead, and her shovel faltered as she hacked it out again. The foreman’s curse barely even registered.

“Where I send the money. It’s not to a man.” Fantine was watching her, large eyes fixed on Eurydice as though she could will the other woman to understand. The fiery light of the furnace made their color impossible to determine.

“Where is it, then?” Eurydice asked, throat still raw from the burning smoke. The workers around them gave no indication of listening in, but Eurydice knew that every one of them, and the foreman to boot, was eagerly waiting for any scrap of information they could glean.

“It’s for my daughter,” Fantine said. “For my Cosette.”

As her daughter’s name passed her lips Fantine’s face was transformed, just for a moment, with a sudden burst of radiance, and Eurydice realized for the first time that Fantine must have been beautiful. The moment passed, and she was once more gaunt and tired, her face smudged with ash and her clothes smoldering slightly where a spark had not yet extinguished itself.

And Eurydice understood. Fantine said ‘Cosette’ the way Eurydice had once said ‘Orpheus,’ the way Persephone said ‘Summer.’ There were stories, in the winter when the wine and whiskey flowed, stories that said that anyone who still remembered what they had left behind might yet make it back up Top, might find the way. Eurydice had seen some try, seen some desperate fools with fading memories seize the last chance they thought they had at freedom, seen them scale the wall and vanish into the wastes. They all came back, dragged in by the Furies or the guard dog, bloody and broken, the light in their eyes  extinguished for good.

But that was the thing about stories, about hope. No matter how many left and were dragged back, beaten and snarling, there were still some who tried, and more who believed, who clung to that part of them that was still human with all their heart and told no one of the secret hope in their breast.

Later, when they were on break at last, ears still ringing with the roar of the hungry furnace, Eurydice caught Fantine by the sleeve. She paid for both of them to sit by the fire, close enough to warm their hands and away from the blowing of its smoke. “Your daughter,” she said. “Tell me what she’s like.”

* * *

It was a quiet friendship, a cautious one, one that grew in the cracks in the armor of their respective hearts. They shared smiles when they chanced to work together, passed along whispered warnings when Hades was in a temper, little things that nevertheless seemed a thousand times brighter than the harsh glare of Hadestowns’ neon lights. Sometimes, Eurydice would pay double at the fire and they would both sit near its warmth.

Summer up Top drew to a close. The seasons in Hadestown never changed, not here where the sky was a thousand miles away. The bitter cold never ebbed, the artificial lights never dimmed. The only way to mark the passing of the seasons was to watch Hades, to learn to match his moods to the absence or closeness of his wife, to count the days till the return of winter by how hard the foreman drove them on. Eurydice was working the assembly line, tightening gears for machines she didn’t care to understand, and she felt it when Hades gave the order to pick up the pace. The conveyor belt stuttered once, twice, and then rolled on, faster than before, and Eurydice’s hands matched it. Around her, a dozen others did the same, and when the foreman wasn’t watching they glanced around at each other, each pair of eyes saying the same: “He’s getting impatient. She’s coming home.”

Come home she did, radiant and contrary, certain that he had miscounted the days and brought her back to the underworld early. There were mud stains on her gown and already wilting flowers braided into her hair. Every eye in Hadestown was fixed on her as she walked out of the train station, a thousand thousand souls desperate for the reminder of what they had lost. A hundred hands reached out to try and touch the fabric of her traveling cloak, to feel the thing that had so recently been exposed to the air up Top, and she twitched it aside before their fingers could reach. No welcoming kiss this year: the depression of winter had set in early, and Persephone jealously guarded all the summer she had managed to steal.

Every year before this, when Persephone had blown in like an angry gale, picking fights with Hades before even stepping out of the train, Eurydice had watched her with hungry eyes, bewitched by her anger, not daring to approach her uninvited and longing to see what might happen if she did. Persephone had taken her aside, when she was new, when she was young, when she thought she might still have a happy life, had given her advice and helped her escape. It was an old tie, one never acknowledged between them, one wrapped up in pain and the harshness of Hades’ justice. But Eurydice still watched her, longed for her, and sometimes Persephone’s eye lingered on Eurydice a moment too long, when Eurydice lined up with the rest.

This year, when Persephone stormed home, Eurydice bought an extra place by the fire and told Fantine, in halting, uncomfortable words, what had happened that day, so many years before. Fantine listened gravely, her eyes fixed somewhere just above Eurydice’s, and when Eurydice’s words finally dried up, she said fervently, scathingly, “ _Men_.”

The response, so different than what she had been expecting, startled laughter out of Eurydice. She laughed until she was breathless from it, until the people around them had turned to stare, until Fantine had joined in almost despite herself. When at last she had to stop, her lungs complaining from the unexpected abuse, she felt lighter than she had in years, since signing her soul away to this place, since watching Orpheus lose his faith and doom her back to hell.

* * *

The lightness lasted through the next day at the factory, through the foreman’s curse and the cuts on her hands from the badly filed gears that healed as soon as they formed but still stung for hours, through the fight between Hades and Persephone that set the whole factory shaking and the conveyor belt to triple its speed. It lasted when Persephone blew into the factory hours later, her smile bright and brittle, to pass her bottles around as her husband roamed the world up Top to find more pliant souls than she to satisfy him. Eurydice fell into line with the others, a coin clutched in her hand, waiting her turn for just a taste of sunshine.

It lasted until Fantine found her that evening, looking wilder than Eurydice had ever seen her. She drew Eurydice away from the crowds, away from the fire to the darkest shadows of Hadestown, by the wall. Her eyes blazed through the darkness. “Those thieves,” she spat. “All that money I send them, every month, and they’re _starving_ _her_. They said... every letter they wrote... they _lied_ , and she eats with the _dog_...” Fantine’s words dissolved into an ugly, broken sob, of rage and heartbreak all in one. Eurydice watched helplessly as she wept. She had been too long underground to remember how to comfort someone, had been too long up Top to think that this was an easily comforted hurt.

Instead, when Fantine had exhausted her sobs, she said, “You’re sure?”

A glare and jerky nod. “I gave the Lady everything I had left, last spring. She promised she would tell me the truth.”

A promise from Persephone meant nearly as little as a promise from her husband, but neither would she lie so directly. Like her husband, Persephone manipulated with half truths, when it amused her to do so, but driving others to despair was not her amusement of choice. If Persephone had said Cosette was starving, it was likely to be true.

Eurydice absently licked dust from her lips as she caught them between her teeth in thought. Finally, bracing herself and reaching out to take Fantine by the hand, she said, “I think I remember the way up.”

* * *

They snuck away during the shift change, when they were least likely to be missed. Eurydice pressed all her savings into the suspicious palms of the wall builders as incentive to let them pass, to not report their disappearance for a few precious hours. She took Fantine’s hand and together they fled the harsh lights of the city, running for the shadows of the wastelands with all their strength. Eurydice jumped at every noise, convinced they had been betrayed and Hades had sent his guard dogs after them, but they reached the shadows without being stopped.

They stopped to catch their breaths, to take stock of what they had done, to marvel at their own daring and contemplate the task still ahead. Eurydice had walked this path only once, years ago, more focused on Orpheus’ back than the scenery. She closed her eyes, pushed past the pain, tried to recall the walk as clearly as she could. _Follow_ _the tracks_ , Hermes had said. _Ignore_ _the barriers and just follow the tracks_. There was no contract this time, no stipulation that either of this do this alone. Eurydice took Fantine’s hand and together they started walking.

* * *

Eurydice could never have said how long they walked. They didn’t get tired, in this wasteland between worlds, didn’t get hungry or footsore. The pressure of fear weighed ever more heavily on both of their chests, insidious whispers in their minds promising failure, promising betrayal, suggesting that there was no such place as the Top at all, that they were doomed to wander the wastelands forever unless they turned back. Fantine ignored it all, put one foot before the other with a look of grim determination, more automaton than woman. Eurydice drew strength from Fantine and kept pace. They walked.

* * *

The first ray of sunlight burned Eurydice’s eyes so badly she screamed.

* * *

They had emerged in the first frost of autumn, emerged from the underworld with no plan or money, nothing save Fantine’s burning need to be with her child and Eurydice’s desire to help her friend. In leaving Hadestown, they had lost the security of work, of food, of the possibility of a place by the fire at night. In the dark and cold of Hadestown, these seemed small prices to pay for the taste of freedom. Here, bathed in a sunlight that burned rather than warmed, faced with a world they had both chosen, once, to leave behind, that price seemed suddenly higher.

Eurydice thought to mention this, thought to ask if Fantine had a plan, thought to confess that she didn’t, but Fantine beat her to it. She spoke, and the words coming out of her mouth were foreign, strange and unintelligible syllables spoken in a familiar voice. Fantine spoke again, turning to look back when Eurydice did not answer, and from the look on her face it was clear she realized the problem. Eurydice dug her ragged nails into her palms, feeling the wild terror of helpless despair well up inside of her. They had come all this way, had defied Hades and broken their contracts, all for it to fall apart in an instant.

And then Fantine laughed. The sound jolted Eurydice out of her growing despair and she stared, wide-eyed, as Fantine threw back her head and laughed. The hole left by her missing teeth stood out starkly in the autumn sun but she seemed not to notice. She laughed wildly, reaching out to grab Eurydice’s hands in hers, and despite herself, despite everything, Eurydice joined in. They laughed at the absurdity of the situation, at the idea that this setback hadn’t occurred to either one of them, even for a moment, laughed because the only alternative was to scream.

At last the laughter subsided, both women out of breath and emptied of their emotions. Slowly, the sound died away, replaced once more by the quiet chirping of the birds nearby and the distant rush of traffic, and Fantine and Eurydice looked at each other. In the light of the sun, so different from the harsh neons of Hadestown, Fantine’s face was softer, its gauntness less pronounced, the brightness of her eyes easier to see. The walk had rubbed off some of the dust from her hair, and Eurydice could finally make out its color, its gold brighter than any metal the mines had to offer.

* * *

They walked. They taught each other words, their tongues tripping over foreign syllables as they haltingly echoed _tree, leaf, sun,_ _wind_ in each other’s half forgotten tongue. They couldn’t say each other’s names, Fantine’s coming out of Eurydice’s mouth with too many syllables and Eurydice’s coming out of Fantine’s with too few. Theirs had never been a friendship of conversation, and its lack was easy to bear.

Harder were the privations of the flesh, as both women’s bodies remembered what it was like to be hungry, to shiver in a cold that could do more than just penetrate the soul, a cold that could kill. They foraged for what they could, aware that they wouldn’t last long without help, unable to do anything except keep walking and hope to find a road. Eurydice shivered her way through the nights, too hungry to sleep well, the light from the moon harsh in her eyes, and she cursed herself for her foolishness. Orpheus hadn’t been lesson enough, it seemed. She had let him lead her to ruin, and now she had let Fantine do the same.

Yet when the morning sun came to burn her eyes, when Fantine sat up from her own sleepless night, Eurydice would force her body up after her, and they would walk on.

* * *

The farmhouse was on its own, its back to the forest from which the two emerged, facing a road more path than highway. Fantine and Euydice exchanged glances, a silent communication learned in the blistering heat of Hades' forge and honed in the burning sunlight of the Top. _What if nothing comes of it?_ their eyes asked. _What_ _if we are left to freeze just like we were before?_ And then, _We_ _have to try_.

Fantine went first, her only asset the words that were slowly returning to her tongue. Eurydice followed half a step behind, her ragged nails biting into her palms. When they reached the door and knocked, the woman who answered it nearly screamed.

Later, Eurydice would never quite piece together how it happened, how Fantine's torrent of pleading, unintelligible words and the farmer woman's fearful, short responses ended in a barn for the two women to sleep in and a crust of bread for them to eat. She watched the interplay of expressions as the conversation washed over her, watched Fantine's large eyes and the wary set of the farmer woman's eyebrows, saw Fantine's shoulder start to slump even as the farmer woman's were beginning to relax, saw the slow, almost unwilling creep of compassion into the farmer woman's face as Fantine explained their story as best she was able. Left without the substance of their words, Eurydice could only see how their faces changed and each woman's tone of voice modulated in response to the other's, a cacophonous duet that at last resolved into a cautious harmony of mutual communication. Eurydice could only smile her thanks, as the farmer woman led them to the drafty barn and avoided looking them in the eye.

It was cold in the barn, the walls doing little to cut the sting of the wind, but they pressed together and ate their food, stretching the warmth of the farmer woman's kindness as far as it would go and then a little more. In the dust of the barn floor Fantine sketched out a crude map, a handful of lines and an X showing where she thought they were. From the farmer woman, she had apparently learned the name of the nearest town, a name she did not recognize, and the distance to Paris, a name she did.

“From Paris,” Fantine said in words Eurydice was slowly growing to understand, “from Paris I know the way.” She drew another line in the dust, a confident, longing stroke of her finger, and at its end she drew a shaky heart. “Cosette,” Fantine said, as though Eurydice needed the confirmation.

“Cosette,” Eurydice echoed, and they looked at the lines drawn in the dust. Somehow, as they looked down, Eurydice's hand found Fantine's, and when they curled up to sleep they did not let go.

* * *

In the morning, the farmer woman came into the barn before they could leave. Eurydice braced herself, expecting harsh words or early morning regret for impulsive charity, but instead she held out a loaf of bread. From the way it steamed in the frigid air, it could only have just come from the oven.

Neither Fantine nor Eurydice moved to take it. Neither was accustomed to charity, to kindness, to gifts without contracts attached. The farmer woman frowned, spoke, offered the bread again.

“She says,” Fantine said, speaking slowly so that Eurydice could puzzle out the meaning behind the words. “It will snow today. We can stay here until it stops.”

The woman nodded and spoke again.

“She wishes she could offer more,” Fantine said, before turning to the woman and, in words Eurydice could half make out, thanking her for her kindness. She took the bread, rapidly cooling now that it had met with the winter, and the farmer woman smiled. Eurydice, half surprising herself, smiled back.

It started to snow around mid-morning, a few flurries turning rapidly into a storm that sent icy wind and snowflakes through the cracks in the wood. Fantine and Eurydice huddled in one of the empty stalls, pressed against each other and shivering. Even Hadestown, Eurydice thought, had not been so cold as this.

She shook her head as soon as the thought entered her mind, banishing it lest it attract the wrong kind of attention. There were stories, down below, that the boss could sense when mortals were most vulnerable, that he could read despair on the breath of hungry souls. Stories, mostly, legends told to excuse choices made in moments of weakness, excuses even, coming from some. Eurydice had never truly believed it. But here, on the run from that very man, shivering and hungry despite the bread in her belly and the roof over her head, Eurydice did not dare put that lack of belief to the test.

By sundown, Eurydice had begun losing the strength to shiver. Fantine, the skinnier of the two, had stopped shivering earlier, and she now sat huddled in on herself, whispering her daughter's name like a prayer. Earlier, Eurydice had made her talk about Cosette, to distract them both and remind them of why they had come, but Fantine had long since fallen silent and Eurydice no longer had the strength to urge her on. They were, Eurydice realized, going to die here.

Even as she let herself voice that thought, in her own tongue so as not to alarm Fantine, the barn door opened. A blast of wind came rushing in and Eurydice flinched, gasping a little at the cold.

The farmer woman closed the door behind her, hurrying forwards amid the snow she had let in. Eurydice blinked, too stupid from cold and worry to understand she was doing. She nudged Fantine, but Fantine barely moved. Her skin, when Eurydice went to shake her awake, was cold to the touch.

The farmer woman squatted down before them, speaking far too rapidly for Eurydice to hope to understand. All she could do was shake her head until the woman trailed off. The woman frowned, cast an expectant eye towards Fantine, and frowned further. Turning back to Eurydice she spoke again, slowly this time, as though to a child. “Too cold here. Come inside.”

Eurydice hesitated. The farmer woman, mistaking calculation for unwillingness, held out a hand. “Come,” she said.

On her own, with no one but herself to care for, Eurydice might have hesitated further, might have taken her chances with the cold over testing the fickle kindness of her fellow men. But Fantine was freezing to death beside her, and the farmer woman was looking at them with wide, concerned eyes. Slowly, Eurydice nodded. “Thank you,” she said, in her broken, accented approximation of Fantine's tongue, and the farmer's wife beamed.

* * *

It took both of them to get Fantine inside, and Eurydice thought her strength might give out before they got there. When at last they reached the house and the farmer woman opened the door, Eurydice nearly collapsed from the sudden wave of heat.

Somehow the farmer woman got them both inside and by the fire. Another half loaf of bread appeared, and Eurydice pressed it into Fantine's still cold hand. Fantine didn't take it, her fingers not thawed enough to grasp and her mind too far gone to fight. Eurydice, between the violent shivers that had begun to return, wrapped her arms around Fantine's bony shoulders and tried to will the life back into her.

“Please,” Eurydice whispered, in her language and in Fantine's. “I can't lose you too.” When the farmer woman turned away to pull the quilt from her bed, Eurydice pressed a kiss to Fantine's icy cheek. “Please,” she said again, and could not have said if she was pleading with Fantine or with the God of Death.

The farmer woman returned with the quilt, wrapping it tightly around both of them, talking briskly in her language. The words fell like raindrops around Eurydice, too rapid to be intelligible even if Eurydice had been in a state to try. The farmer's wife seemed not to mind.

At some point, despite her worry, or perhaps because of it, Eurydice drifted off to sleep. When she woke, with a start of panic, the fire had turned to a bed of embers that gave off more heat than light, and Fantine's hands were warm to the touch.

* * *

The storm lasted another two days. The farmer woman -- Jeanne, they learned -- refused to let them leave, and so in return Eurydice and Fantine made themselves as useful to her as they could. Fantine coaxed her fingers back into needlework, and Eurydice, never having been adept at that art, took up other chores, accomplishing the tasks that Jeanne, a widow of six months, did not have the strength to complete herself. In the evening, the three sat by the fire, sharing bread and wine and stories. Eurydice, unable to offer the latter, instead reached into long ignored memories and brought out some of Orpheus' songs, and only cried a little when she heard how her own voice couldn't do them justice. At night, she and Fantine curled up by the remains of the fire, pressed together for warmth and intertwined for comfort.

When at last the weather cleared, Jeanne gave them her husband's old coat and a bundle of food, enough to last a few days if they were careful. They thanked Jeanne yet again, Fantine with earnest fluency and Eurydice trying her best with words that would not cooperate on her tongue, and took their leave.

They walked. The storm had cleared out the bitterest of the cold, leaving the world grey and sparkling but slightly warmer, just enough to not freeze in the weak sunlight that pierced the cloud cover. The nights, though, brought the cold back with a vengeance, a damp cold that seeped through the coat they shared and thrust tendrils of ice deep into their bones. Despite the cold, they shied away from the houses dotting the road, all too aware of the figure they cut, two women alone, ragged and desperate and alone. Jeanne had been kind, but who was to say that luck would hold. They did not dare test it. Still, after two nights on the road, huddling under trees to try and break the wind, rationing Jeanne's provisions as strictly as they could bear, Fantine's breaths had begun to rattle in her chest and Eurydice felt faint every time she stood and they both knew they could not continue like this much longer.

The first farmhouse they knocked on slammed the door in their face before Fantine could so much as get out a word, but the second housed a tired young woman with three children clinging to her, all fighting to get out the door as she struggled to keep them inside. The biggest of the three, knees already knobby and cheeks red from even this brief exposure to the cold, escaped her grasp and darted for the snow. Fantine caught him as he went, scooping him up in arms stronger than they looked and laughingly scolding him for his mischief before passing him back to his mother. This earned Fantine and Eurydice a place inside the house and a bowl of soup to share -- a scarcity of dishes as much as of food -- and their story, of two women seeking work in Paris after the death of their fathers, earned them an invitation to stay the night. An old woman looked suspiciously out at them from under a pile of ragged blankets in the corner, but the young woman spoke quietly to her and she subsided.

"Her mother," Fantine murmured to Eurydice, having caught a snatch of the conversation. Eurydice nodded, and was distracted by a tug on her sleeve. The biggest of the girls, a toddling thing of no more than three, looked up at her with wide, curious eyes and lisped a question Eurydice could not hope to decipher.

Fantine, though, smiled at the girl and pulled her onto her lap, leaning in as though sharing a secret as she answered the girl's question. Soon, this attracted the attention of the smaller girl, barely walking at all, and Fantine beckoned her over, raising her voice a little so both girls could hear. From her tone, Eurydice thought she was telling them a fairy tale, or perhaps inventing one as she went. Even the boy, still sulking from his thwarted escape attempt, crept over, trying his hardest to look as though he wasn't listening as intently as his sisters.

Fantine finished her story and, spurred on by the wide eyes of the younger girl and the eager pleas of the elder, started another, but Eurydice could hear her voice starting to give, could see the glint of unshed tears beginning to well up in her eyes. She cleared her throat, attracting the attention of both her friend and the girls, and began to sing.

In the morning, as they made to leave, the mother caught Fantine by the sleeve. She had a sister, in the next village down, a kind woman with children of her own. If they knocked there, she promised, they would be well received. Fantine and Eurydice glanced at each other, both too experienced in the cruelties of men and women alike to trust this kindness, both too afraid of the winter winds to turn it down. Finally, Fantine pressed her hand in thanks and promised that they would ask. She kissed each of the children and, as the door closed behind them, hastily wiped away her tears before the winter could freeze them to her cheek.

* * *

They spent a night here, two nights there, knocked at doors until they found souls kind enough to offer shelter, huddled together under trees when they found none at all. They stayed in one farmhouse for a whole week while Eurydice burned with fever, and in another for nearly as long until Fantine's sickness had faded to nothing but a persistent cough she refused to wait out. They fought about it, Eurydice terrified of the ravages of the weather on their bodies and Fantine growing more heartbroken with every mile they closed between her and Cosette, argued in rough whispers to avoid waking the family that had so generously offered them a place by the fire. For the first time in weeks they slept with their backs to each other.

Word traveled fast, faster than two exhausted women could ever hope to, and as they got closer to Paris more and more doors opened to them, cousins and sisters and friends of those who'd already given them a roof for the night. They played with children and helped where they could, took messages and gifts from one village to the next, paid their way with deeds since they had no money to offer. Some houses, home to richer families or just more generous hearts, pressed coins into their hands as they left. Others gave them food, what little the family had to spare, or clothes when their own could stand no more of the wind. Some could only offer prayers to their God to keep them safe.

The closer they got to Montfermeil the more Fantine talked, about Cosette, about what she would do to the inkeepers who had treated her so badly, about how they would get a room in Paris together where no one would talk and live until they had saved enough to move back to the country where Cosette could play outside all summer long. Eurydice let her talk, held her hand when no one else was looking, stayed silent. She thought of the lengths someone had once gone to to save her from a Hell of her own choosing and promised herself that Cosette would have a happier ending.

* * *

Paris was a crush of noise and people, louder even than Hadestown and its ever-present din of machinery, filled with shouting people and screaming animals. Children, ragged and cheerful, scampered endlessly underfoot, while tradesmen offered their services at top volume and well-bred women picked their way through the mud, escorted by equally well-bred men, and pretended not to notice the chaos around them. Eurydice shrank back from the press of bodies and even Fantine, who had lived in Paris not so many years before, seemed wide-eyed and lost. Unconsciously, their hands found each other.

They found a place at an inn, paying all the coin they had managed to save up over the course of their journey for a tiny, filthy room barely less drafty than an alley. It left them nothing with which to buy food, but they had long since grown accustomed to hunger.

"It's not far now," Fantine said. Her voice was hoarse from wind and hunger and the cough that had not quite left her chest, but her eyes shone brighter than they had in weeks. "Less than three days, and that's if we stop on the way."

"And after that?" Eurydice wanted to know. Weeks of exposure had given her more confidence in the language, had trained her ear to pick out words and make sense of sentences, but her tongue had yet to follow suit. The words came out ugly and hesitant, and when she could she stayed quiet, let Fantine do the talking and let their hosts think she was simple.

"We can find work," Fantine said, as she had every other time Eurydice had asked this question. "I can teach you to sew, and we'll make shirts and take in mending. And then we can take our work outside in the summer, and earn our way in the sun."

Eurydice nodded, swallowed her objections, told herself that they had come too far to turn back now. She let Fantine talk until her chest was exhausted and the words had turned to coughs, then pulled her close and kissed her silent.

* * *

They left Paris at daybreak the next morning, crossing paths with the wave of tradesmen and laborers coming into the city to start their work day. Fantine was subdued, her excitement of the night before faded by the reminder of the last time she had taken this path. The ragged children of the streets scampered around them, hollering to each other as they began their days, ignoring Fantine and Eurydice completely. One, a tattered girl of no more than eight, with a heavily patched skirt that still barely covered her legs and a head of dirty brown hair that fell into her eyes as she ran, made Fantine start and gasp. She dashed away the tears always welled in her eyes these days, just on the brink of falling, and put her head down, placed one foot in front of the other on the road out of Paris and pretended that it required her full attention. Eurydice walked by her side, watched as the late winter dawn played over mother and children alike, tried not too ask questions, even to herself, that she did not want answered.

* * *

The inn in Montfermeil was loud and crowded, filled with travelers and tradesman come in from the cold for a drink and a song. Fantine and Eurydice slipped in as a gust of wind blew through the door, their chapped faces and battered clothes standing out even among the rough crowd already assembled. The inkeeper's wife looked them over, her eyes cold and bright with suspicion, and she started toward them, parting the patrons in her path like a steamship. Eurydice had a dozen stories on the tip of her tongue, half translated into the language she still only partially spoke, when Fantine let out a cry and ran, darting past the advancing woman toward back of the dining room. It took Eurydice a moment to drag her eyes from the inkeeper's wife, her advance paused in surprise as she and the rest of the inn looked to see what had caused so much distress and movement, and a moment more to realize that the creature Fantine now held tight in her arms was a child, stiff and dirty and terrified. The inkeeper's wife too realized the source of Fantine's distress, and immediately changed course, charging towards mother and child with a fury that would have sent nearly anyone diving for cover.

But Fantine had defied the Lord of the Dead to reach this place, had survived the journey through hell below and the winter above, had given everything she had and more that she didn't, and she met the inkeeper's wife head on, arms still wrapped protectively around the child, who was now shaking with terror and confusion. Eurydice edged slowly forward through the crowd.

"What is the meaning of this?" the inkeeper's wife demanded. "You, get back to work immediately!" This last was addressed to the child, who quailed more than ever and tried to wriggle out of Fantine's arms. But Fantine's grip had been strengthened by months in the mines, her arms toughened by weeks building the wall, and the child could not escape.

"I am Cosette's mother," Fantine declared, and at these words the child stopped struggling and stared at her, shock plain to see on her thin little face. "I have come to take her home with me."

Fantine's words caused yet another commotion among the guests, all of whom began exclaiming at once. Eurydice, still not quite re-accustomed to the noise of the Top, worked hard not to flinch. In the chaos, the inkeeper sidled up to stand by his wife, who immediately stepped back, ceding him the floor and glaring at Fantine with all the strength of her fury. Eurydice's eyes narrowed, as she looked the inkeeper up and down.

"Mother, are you?" he asked, and his every word seemed coated in oil, greasy and bitter and vile. "If that is so -- and don't think I trust your word alone on that -- then you owe us a considerable debt for our troubles. 12 francs a month we asked you, an entirely reasonable request in this economy, to provide for a child of that age, we who have daughters of our own to raise." He seemed to be talking to the audience more than to Fantine, an audience already disposed to siding with his grease than with her desperation.

"You asked 15," Fantine snapped, not to be intimidated. "And you promised she was being treated like your own child."

At this pronouncement the child -- Cosette -- let out a bark of bitter laughter. She instantly turned ghostly pale, hunching down as much as she could within Fantine's grip as though expecting a blow. From the way the inkeeper's wife's face twisted into a sneer of hatred, Eurydice thought she was not wrong to fear one.

If Fantine saw this she did not react, too focused on her hatred for the inkeeper himself. He too was laughing, a twisted mockery of true mirth, inviting the watching crowd to join him in tearing Fantine's dreams to pieces. "With what you sent us, you're lucky we didn't turn her out on the street," he said, and one of the watching tradesmen let out a call of agreement. One by one the others took up the cry, until Fantine was pelted on all sides by accusations that struck like stones and jeering suggestions of how to pay her debts. She shrank back, fighting tears, but did not back down. Eurydice, meanwhile, felt despair rising in her, a helplessness nearly as all consuming as the one she'd felt right after Orpheus lost his faith and doomed her to Hell forever. They could not win here, not when the inkeeper already had the town on his side and the inkeeper's wife looked ready to beat both mother and child and leave them to die in the cold.

But Eurydice had sworn, that day so long ago when she told Fantine she knew the way out, had sworn that she would not repeat the failures of her past, that she would stay this time, would make up for both Orpheus' failures and her own, and so she stepped out of the crowd and into the space next to Fantine.

"And who are you?" the inkeeper demanded, sneering and dismissive already.

"What's it to you?" Fantine demanded, just as Eurydice said, "Her sister."

The inkeeper raked his eyes over the two of them, taking in Eurydice's dark skin, ashen now, from so long without sunlight, and Fantine's shorn blond hair, the way Fantine's words flew easily from her lips and Eurydice's sank like stones, awkward and misshapen. He leered, his expression clearly conveying the accusation he did not need to say out loud.

"A debt's a debt," he said, the leer still twisting his face. "If you can pay what you owe, you can take the girl. If not..." He shrugged. "Well. I'm sure you can find a way to pay."

"And we're full for the night," his wife interjected. "Find somewhere else to sleep."

Fantine looked around, took in the faces of the crowd, sought a friendly face where there were none, looked at Cosette still trembling in her arms. Eurydice touched her arm. Theirs had started as a friendship without words, back when they were just two more lost souls lost in a sea of them, a friendship of gestures and sidelong glances, of stolen smiles and silent solidarity. Eurydice drew on this now, met Fantine's eyes and said _Trust me_.

Fantine jerked a nod, barely perceptible to the watching crowd. Eurydice glanced at the inkeeper, then at Fantine, gestured slightly. _Distract him?_ Fantine took a breath, drew strength from her lover and her child, began to argue once again. Taking advantage of the moment, Eurydice bent down and touched the child, who started as though she'd been struck. Fantine swallowed a soft cry of distress as she talked. "Tomorrow," Eurydice told Cosette in an undertone, her words still halting but filled with all the gentleness she could muster. "Can you find a way outside?"

Cosette nodded mutely. She seemed not to know where to look and so kept her eyes on the ground, her shoulders hunched in as far as Fantine's grip would let them go.

"Bring anything you want to keep," Eurydice said. "And we'll take you away from here."

Cosette didn't respond. Eurydice waited a beat, just in case, then straightened. When Fantine paused for breath she interjected, "We should go."

"Too right you should go," the inkeeper said. "And don't even think of coming back here, or I'll have you arrested."

Fantine made to argue yet again, but Eurydice squeezed her hand. _Trust me_ , her body language said, and Fantine did. The argument died in her throat and she slumped, the strength seeming to leave her completely. She clung to Cosette a moment longer, kissed her head and smoothed her dirty hair away from her face, then let go. The moment she was released from Fantine's grip Cosette practically dove under the table, picked up a pair of knitting needles attached to a tangle of yarn and began almost frantically working at it, shooting terrified glances towards the inkeeper's wife as she did so. Eurydice and Fantine made their way out through the laughing crowd, let themselves be mocked and reached for. As they stepped through the door into the wind, Eurydice glanced back, and her eyes met Cosette's as the child watched them go, her eyes wide with confusion and the slightest glimmer of hope.

* * *

Fantine wept that night, as they huddled together under the blanket a kind family had given them. "She didn't even know me," she repeated, her words incoherent and aching. Eurydice held her, ran her hands through Fantine's jagged hair, whispered in her own language, "She will." When at last Fantine drifted into troubled, exhausted sleep, Eurydice stayed awake, eyes on the stars glimmering above.

* * *

Cosette did not come until past noon, when the sun had already passed its zenith and begun returning to the underworld. She walked slowly, gripping a bucket as large as she was with white-knuckled hands, glancing back furtively with every few steps. When she caught sight of Fantine and Eurydice she stopped. Fantine half ran to close the distance, and Cosette stayed still, watching with wide eyes. When Fantine once more swept her up into her arms, Cosette asked, “Are you really my mother?”

“Yes,” Fantine said. “And I’m so sorry.”

“Have you really come to take me away?”

“ _Yes_.” It was spoken fervently, like a promise, like a prayer and finally, finally Cosette smiled.

“I’m glad,” she said, and she set down her bucket and returned her mother’s embrace.

* * *

As the three headed away from Montfermeil, Cosette walking between the two women, the wind carried a trace of a sound toward them, a sound that Eurydice would have thought she'd only imagined if it had not been so familiar to her, the sound of a train whistling its way towards the earth. Fantine and Eurydice exchanged glances, smiles tucked into the corner of each of their mouths. Spring, it seemed, had come at last.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [i will stand in the dark with you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20378077) by [druidforhire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/druidforhire/pseuds/druidforhire)




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